About two months ago I decided that I wanted to have lucid dreams. I was very motivated and started a dream journal. I wrote down every dream and got better and better dream recall, but no lucid dreams. Because of this I lost my motivation: I still wanted to have lucid dreams, but when I woke in the morning I always thought "naa, that dream wasn't interesting, I don't have to write that one down". Two days ago I decided to use an NLP technique that I have used for other purposes before. It worked: not only did I write down the dreams, but the first two nights I used the technique I had my two first (very short) lucid dreams! So I though I would share the technique.

Suppose you want to do some take: exercise, work at you computer without getting distracted by facebook or LDforums, do the dishes, whatever. Now sit down on a chair a few meters from where you would do the task. Imaging seeing a copy of yourself doing the task while you are still sitting in the chair (I close my eyes to do this, but that might not a necessary). When the copy of you have done the task, notice that he/she is very happy about having completed the task. Now imagine that you are just a soul/ghost and you can fly into that copy of yourself, so that you become that person who have just done the task and enjoy that you have done that task. Now you go back in time so you do the task backwards, and you go all the way back until the point where you are sitting in the chair and thinking about doing the task, so that you know that you are the person who will do the task. If you will, you can now go forth and back in time a few times, so you see that doing the task is indeed your future.

That is how it works in general. It is a bit difficult to see a person dreaming, to I just imagined that I entered his (the copy of myself's) dream. I know this sounds weird, but I worked for me. Remember both to see the person dream and to see the person writing in his/her dream journal.

Interesting, I did something just like this when studying last year. I had to study some mathematics at an advanced level, normally I can do it just fine but I just wasn't motivated to do it. Slowly the days passed and I for some reason just never bothered to study it, I kept getting distracted by trivial little tasks.

Then one day I sat down right next to my desk to do some long overdue meditation. While meditating I decided to visualise myself getting up and doing the study, I visualised myself reading the textbook with a purpose to fully understand every concept that was going on. After a while of doing this I got up and just sat down and got to work.

I think before doing any kind of project or activity its a good idea to stop and let your mind process the size of the task/project you are about to do. Think about how long it will take, how much energy is required, how long you will have to go only thinking about the task and nothing else. Think about what you are also giving up to do this project, and think of the pros of doing it, how happy you will feel for doing it.

I never thought to apply this sort of mentality towards dreaming though, I too have had mornings where I think nah that was a boring dream im not writing it down, so yeah thanks for sharing this might give it a shot tonight.

What my plan will be is wake up at 4:30, but before going to bed sit and think about how im going to go about doing a WILD and such.

"There is theoretical abstraction, and then there is true abstraction."